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SEATTLE, April 25, 2000 - Travelers flying on Icelandair will be the world's first to experience a new, more spacious and user-friendly passenger cabin on the Boeing 757-200. Boeing today delivered the first of that model equipped with the all-new passenger cabin interior to Icelandair, the flag carrier of Iceland. The new cabin interior incorporates contemporary interior design elements of the award-winning Boeing 777 and the Boeing Next-Generation 737. It features larger, longer overhead stowage bins, curved ceiling panels that offer up to three inches of additional headroom and improved interior lighting. The cabin also will have new vacuum-style lavatories, making them simpler to service and maintain. The advanced engineering on the new stowage bins eliminates the need for an internal support brace. The brace had limited the amount of baggage that could be put in the bins. Lack of a brace means a single stowage bin on the 757 can accommodate as many as five of the popular standard-size roll-aboard suitcases. Stowage bins on the Airbus A320 and A321, which do require support braces, can only accommodate four. The interior, which is the same as that introduced last year on the new Boeing 757-300s, is offered on all 757-200s ordered after March 2000 or with a cabin design finalized after March 2000. "Our airline customers asked us to improve the 757 cabin without sacrificing any of the features that make it first class," said Pat Shanahan, Boeing 757 Programs vice president. "We accepted that challenge and ended up with a cabin that passengers feel is more spacious." Icelandair plans to use the new 757-200 on its trans-Atlantic routes from various European destinations via its hub at Reykjavik, Iceland, to East Coast and Midwestern cities in the United States. The carrier, whose flights average 3.7 hours (compared to an average 2.4 hours for the entire 757 world fleet), chose the new cabin interior for passenger comfort. "Cabin comfort becomes especially important when people are flying from five-and-a-half to eight hours from our hub at Reykjavik to our five U.S. getaways -- Boston, New York, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Orlando," said Leifur Magnusson, senior vice president of fleet development and safety for Icelandair. Magnusson said Icelandair likes the reduced service time the new vacuum lavatories will bring. He said Icelandair, which plans to go to an all-Boeing 757 fleet by summer 2002, also likes the fact that the new 757-200 has a common interior with the two new Boeing 757-300s it plans to put into service in 2002 and 2003. All Boeing 757-300s are delivered with the new interior. Condor Flugdienst, the German charter carrier that has had 757-300s in service for more than a year, has reported that surveys indicate that passengers like the new interior and consider the cabin more spacious. The Boeing 757-300, which just established a first-year in-service record for reliability, carries 42 more passengers than the 757-200 in a typical two-class seat layout. ### Contact: Cheryl Addams (206) 237-0259 |
